


Personal Space

by 401



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Boundaries, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Dry Humping, Exploration, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Steve Rogers, Touch-Starved, Touchy-Feely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 18:01:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16979253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/401/pseuds/401
Summary: Steve decides Bucky does not need fixing.





	Personal Space

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think!

“Can I kiss you?”

 

Steve’s head snapped up from his book. He had misheard, surely. The question had come from silence, so he was not sure how he had misheard, but he must have.

 

“W-what’s that, Buck?”

 

“Can I kiss you?” Bucky repeated, “Am I allowed to kiss you?”

 

Steve faltered, goldfishing for a minute before he actually managed to form words.

 

“Elaborate for me,” Steve said cautiously.

 

Bucky looked down at his hands for a moment, as if rehearsing what he was going to say. Steve thought that this was odd as Bucky usually blurted things out as soon as they passed through his head, but maybe this was progress. It was something that they had been working on, knowing when things were appropriate. When he could talk to people, when he could say what he was thinking, when he could walk away from a conversation without it seeming rude. Boundaries and decorum. All things that slip away when you spend decades working alone, being beaten down, wiped,  and seeing nothing but brutality and efficiency.

 

“You told me about personal space. Like when I want to touch Natasha’s hair, but I forget to ask. Or that time when my hands were cold, and I put them up Sam’s shirt because he was warm,” Bucky started, his voice getting smaller as if he found these stories embarrassing.

Sam had found the hand incident hilarious, once the shock had worn off.

 

“You said I can’t just touch somebody because I want to,” Bucky continued.

 

“Yep, that’s right,” Steve agreed, “If you know the person well, you can ask, but if it’s a stranger, you keep it to yourself.”

 

Bucky nodded.

 

“When you speak, I want to kiss you,” He whispered, “All the time, actually. That was a lie. I lied. I want to kiss you all the time.”

 

Steve chuckled.

 

“That wasn’t a lie, you just didn’t finish your thought.”  


Bucky paused and nodded, muttering something about ‘not lying’ to himself. For a few too many beats, the apartment was silent, bar the amiable background noise of the television. The light from the standing lamp in the corner cast the whole living room golden and liquid.

The pair had fallen into comfortable domestic security. They lived day by day, good days and bad ones. Days where Bucky spoke and laughed, slept, showered and ate. Days where he remembered his way around the apartment and remembered everyone’s names. There were the days where he could only do some of these things and days where he could do none, but they were less frequent. Steve forced himself not to dwell on those days and figured that he should be grateful. Today was one of the good ones.

 

“Why have you never told me this?” Steve sighed.

 

“You don’t want to kiss me,” Bucky replied matter-of-factly.

 

“What makes you think that?” Steve chuckled.

 

“Personal space.”

 

Steve often forgot how black and white Bucky could be sometimes. Even before the war, before Hydra. He had always been a literal being, frustrated by small-talk and analogies. Never a hint-taker. He was compassionate, intuitive and desperately sensitive, but literal all the same.

 

“I ask for personal space in _public_ ,” Steve explained, “That’s more because I’m shy than anything else.”

 

Bucky squirmed in his seat a little at the thought of kissing Steve in public. His face felt warm and his stomach jumped.

 

“And sometimes, I need space at home too. Because I don’t want to do anything that will confuse you.”

 

“I’m not stupid”

 

“No, I never said you were. But you _do_ struggle with touch and boundaries…”

 

“…I can’t remember what touch is supposed to be like.”

 

Steve suddenly felt as if he might choke. The warm smell of vanilla and patchouli candles, the heat from the radiator behind the couch, the weight of his clothes all became tight and overwhelming. His nose burned. He ignored it as best as he could.

 

“I’m sorry, Buck,” He sighed quietly.

 

Bucky drew his knees to his chest and turned away from Steve, not dismissively, just distractedly.

 

“When you touch me, it doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel scared,” he finally mumbled.

 

Steve smiled to himself. It felt good, the reassurance that he was doing at least one thing right in this hopelessly tricky situation.

 

“Is that why you want to kiss me?”  


“I want to kiss you because you are beautiful. And sometimes, looking at you isn’t enough because I can’t feel you and I can’t taste you,” Bucky almost whispered.

 

Steve felt something twinge in his throat, like words that had no air behind them. He was blushing hard, he could feel it. The warmth crept up his neck and over his ears. He was out of his depth, but then again, he had been ever since Bucky had come back. Everything about the man pushed him out of the narrow oblong of fixed habits that was his comfort zone.

Steve did a lot of things to protect Bucky, or at least cushion his ride into normalcy, but lying was not one of them. He held back, chose his words and his movements carefully, changed his tone and his posture when it was needed. It had taught Steve a lot about himself. He had learnt that when he was stressed, he subconsciously hardened and raised his voice, that he looked angry when he was concentrating, that he could be intimidating when he was just trying to stress a point. So, he had done a lot of work and self-regulation, but he had vowed to himself that he would never flat out lie.

“I want to kiss you too, a lot, but I don’t want to stop you from getting better in any way, even if it feels good to me,” Steve explained, “I don’t want to scare you off.”

 

“You only scare me when you act like you don’t want to be around me. Then, I get scared that you’ll leave, or tell me to go away.”

 

Steve felt his throat tighten again, with none of the pleasant heat of last time.

 

“Bucky,” He said quietly, “I need you to look at me and listen to me for a minute.”  


“I am listening.”  


“ _Look_ at me, Bucky.”

 

Bucky turned towards the Captain and stared at his hands. Not his own, Steve’s. It would do; eye contact was on the list.

 

“Buck, if I could spend every minute with you, I would. If I could kiss you and hold you and…sleep with you without making this all more complicated, I would in a heartbeat…”

 

“Steve, I’m never going to be exactly the same. Sam and Bruce both said you shouldn’t wait for that.”

 

This had to be the most times in an evening that Bucky had left Steve speechless and feeling like a fool. Usually, it was mental maths or working the laptop, something inconsequential that Bucky was inadvertently and unexpectedly amazing at. It was not usually feelings. Steve was used to having to sit down with the soldier and dissect why it was rude to stare, why telling someone how you feel might not be appropriate, why all of these interpersonal habits that he himself took for granted might take Bucky a little longer but were so important. He told _Bucky_ how to feel better, he told _Bucky_ how they could move forward. It was not often that Bucky turned around and told him exactly why he was wrong.

“You…you’re right,” Steve sighed, “I’m sorry, Buck. I just worry.”  


“So, can I kiss you or not?”  


Steve hesitated, but noticed that his lips had already parted and that he was achingly conscious of them. When was the last time he had eaten? Had he brushed his teeth before or after breakfast today? Should he do it again? Was he even a good kisser?

The questions were like oil in water, distractingly present but never managing to truly infiltrate and mix with the sudden, fraught need that made up the rest of his thoughts.

 

“Yeah,” he croaked, “Yeah, c’mere.”

 

Bucky stood up from his couch and moved onto Steve’s. stepping over the coffee table and climbing on ungracefully, all knees and elbows and invaded personal space. Watching Bucky move in his own direct and ungainly way was now endearing. The way he half-sat on Steve’s lap, knees knocking almost painfully was no longer ‘something to work on’ or ‘one for the list’. The way he seemingly ignored the world around him was enthralling instead of worrying. Steve looked at a man walking an alternative path through scary territory, someone labelled as broken and wrong, and he saw nothing to fix.

 

Bucky leaned forward until their noses touched. His nose was cold, Steve’s was burning hot with the flush across the bridge of it.

 

“You’re sure I can?” Bucky whispered.

 

“Mhm,” Steve breathed. His eyes were already closed.

 

The kiss wasn’t anything that Steve had expected. Firstly, it was soft. The clumsiness with which Bucky seemed to approach anything that was not combat was gone, and Steve felt as though he had been kissed like this every day since 1940.

It was completely and fundamentally right.

 

The softness startled him. Bucky was tactile, maybe more than most, but not gentle. If he held your hand, he squeezed. If he hugged someone, his chin would dig into their shoulder and he would hold on too tight, and for too long. The only excess to be felt here though, was the amount of blood that seemed to be hurtling around Steve’s body at a mile a minute.

 

“You don’t taste nice,” Bucky whispered bluntly against Steve’s mouth.

 

“My chapstick is coconut. You don’t like coconut,” Steve chuckled.

 

Bucky hummed gently, cupping Steve’s cheeks and pulling him closer. He ran his tongue along his bottom lip and Steve couldn’t help making a noise. He couldn’t help pushing into it, he couldn't help pulling Bucky onto his lap. Intrigue had become need alarmingly quickly and Steve was not sure if it was a train he needed to stop. He pulled away and looked at the solider. He was doe-eyed, his breath leaving parted, wet lips.

 

“Are we stopping?” Bucky whispered breathlessly.

 

Steve shook his head and returned to him, lips finding his throat and placing open mouthed, grazing kisses over the skin. Bucky made a low whine at this, tightening his grip in Steve’s hair. Steve swore that he _felt_ the sound. There was no other way it could have struck him so completely. It ached, he had to arch away from the twinge in his stomach, but that just pushed them even closer.

 

Made him even harder.

 

He hoped that it wasn’t obvious; the last thing he wanted to feel was self-conscious. As if reading his mind, Bucky gripped his thighs, pinning Steve to the couch and pressing them as close to each other as they could be. Steve may have been embarrassed, but he wasn’t alone. And Bucky was wearing sweatpants. Steve groaned in frustration and gave in, arching his hips against him and biting the soldiers lip, just hard enough that it would sting.

Bucky moaned.

 

A full keening moan that threatened to pull Steve apart. He had not heard it for years, and even then, it was through a wall and for someone else. The one time it had been for him was the day before Bucky had been deployed. Steve had very deliberately squashed the memory of that sound. Now, it absorbed him, and he wanted to hear it over and over.

 

“Buck,” Steve breathed, his voice sounding drowned and cottony, “Buck, I…”

 

“Don’t stop,” Bucky interrupted, “Please don’t.”

 

“You’re not overwhelmed?”

 

“I am,” Bucky admitted, “Completely.”

 

Steve fixed his eyes on him again. Blown pupils, blue darkening almost to black. His hair had been pulled in locks from the confines of a haphazard bun and now stuck to the bridge of his nose. His lips looked punished, bitten and inviting. Steve’s logic told him to step back, his body told him to taste them again, just to make sure.

 

_Trust him for once. He trusts you completely._

Steve nodded, hesitant but desperate.

 

“Steve, I have never been so sure of anything in my life.”  


The message was as clear as it could be, so Steve elected to listen. He pulled Bucky’s t-shirt over his head slowly, repeating with his own before replacing the cover of clothing with one of kisses, bites and searching hands.

Bucky was responsive. Intoxicatingly so. His breathing hitched and shuddered, his thighs trembled. He bit back against the rougher kisses and moaned into the soft ones. He pulled Steve’s hair, told him where he wanted his mouth and redirected when needed. If perfection had a soundtrack, it was the hoarse, winded moans and the whispered prayers of need and pleasure that were pouring from Bucky with more and more urgency.

Steve wondered when he would break, when the grinding of hips and hot slide of tongue against tongue would pull him apart. Would he moan his name? Steve hoped so, dearly.

“I can’t kiss you in enough places at once,” he groaned, gripping Bucky’s ass and pulling him somehow closer, flusher to his own body.

 

The soldier muttered something incomprehensible, keening into the pressure involuntarily. Steve watched in awe as a winded string of almost shocked moans left Bucky’s mouth, as if climax had crept up on him. The metal arm whirred, its fingers tightening painfully in Steve’s hair. The Captain kissed him one last time, catching the gasping, begging torrent of sobbed out pleasure in his mouth. It was intimate, having someone beg for touch against his lips, and it pushed Steve further than he thought he could go. His vision greyed as he joined him, heat flooding his hips and the metronome of his heart matching the easy rhythm their bodies had fallen in to.

 

“I want to change and shower but that means letting go,” Bucky finally whispered after what could have been any measure of time. Steve had stopped feeling anything but his pulse.

 

He chuckled breathlessly.

 

“It does, yeah.”

 

Bucky grumbled in reluctance and went heavy and pliable, nose buried in Steve’s neck, blocking out the world.

 

“We can stay here for a bit?” He asked, slurring a little.

 

“As long as you want,” Steve whispered.

 

 

 


End file.
